The Coyne family's horse-eel at Lough Nahooin

Connemara, County Galway. Bog country, scattered with small loughs. Locals called what some said lived in them the horse-eel, or peiste. Lough Nahooin lies near Claddaghduff, in Omey parish. By one account, it is little more than a pond, about the size of a soccer field.

February 22, 1968. At about seven in the evening, Stephen Coyne, a farmer, and his eldest son, aged eight, went down to the bog by the lough to bring up some dry peat. On reaching the peat bed beside Nahooin, Coyne noticed a black object in the water. Taking it for the family dog, Coyne whistled. The dog appeared from the woods instead, and started barking angrily at the thing in the lough.

The barking seemed to provoke a response. The animal swam directly towards the dog with its mouth open. When Coyne moved towards the dog, the beast immediately swam away.

The boy ran home to bring Mrs Coyne. When Mrs Coyne and the children returned, the creature was still there, busily patrolling the tiny lake. To and fro it went, before seven members of the Coyne family. It swam in different directions, dipping its head underwater, now and then showing its tail near the surface. They left as dusk was setting.

They put its length at around twelve feet. It had a pole-like head and neck, about nine inches to a foot in diameter. When it dived, two humps came into view. It had a flat tail. The skin was black, slick and hairless, with a texture like an eel's.

Two details stayed strange. The animal seemed to have no eyes. And a pair of stump-like protrusions stuck out of its head, which later summaries call horns. No account mentions a sound or a smell. No photograph or film of the animal exists in any source.

In 1968, members of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau gathered in Clifden. Among them were F. W. "Ted" Holiday, Dr Roy P. Mackal and Captain Lionel Leslie. One account also names David James, founder of the bureau. At Nahooin, netting began in July 1968, with a net stretched across the lough in a bid to snare the animal. On 11 July 1968, Holiday tape-recorded interviews with local witnesses in Connemara about horse-eel traditions.

The nets remained empty. Except for one morning. Several of the net's buoys had sunk out of sight. Holiday pondered if a peiste had challenged the blockade during the night. For the rest of the team's short stay, there was no sign of a creature in the lough.

No source accuses the Coyne family of a hoax. Holiday felt the description fitted a giant eel better than a crocodilian, and the local name, horse-eel, carries the same idea. Later, in The Dragon and the Disc (1973), Holiday linked lake monsters to dragon lore and UFO phenomena, and commentators drew Nahooin into that argument. Some sources date the sighting to 1969, but the dated account places it on February 22, 1968.

Nahooin and Lough Fadda are named as the main horse-eel lakes. The story was told in Holiday's The Dragon and the Disc and revisited in the 2006 documentary The Connemara Monster, directed by Brian Reddin. An artist's reconstruction from Orbis Books, based on the eyewitness accounts, has been reproduced by Karl Shuker. The animal itself was never found.